Freemanâs initial stake cost about $25mn, which he said was mostly raised from friends and family.
He has invested for years with his uncle, Dr Scott Freeman, a former pharmaceutical executive. The two recently built an activist stake in a publicly traded pharmaceutical company called Mind Medicine.
There’s more:
Freeman also said he had interned for years at a New Jersey hedge fund, Volaris Capital. Just before his 17th birthday, Freeman and its founder, Vivek Kapoor, a former Credit Suisse executive, published a paper titled âIrreducible Risks of Hedging a Bond with a Default Swapâ.
Jake Freeman writes that his “plan for the realignment of BBBY consists of two crucial legs: cutting debt and raising capital.” He proceeds to detail his proposal for both legs, which would culminate in reducing the company’s senior debt from $1.2 billion to $500 million (through an exchange offer of the current discounted debt into far less par debt), and the issuance of converts to somehow raise $1 billion in the market (how this would have worked when the stock was trading around $5 with imploding EBITDA is anyone’s guess). But what was most remarkable is what Freeman said in the highlighted section: namely that the “US options market is pricing in high implied volatility for BBBY derivatives which can be leveraged and capitalized on in order to effect a realignment of BBBY’s debt”, in other words a debt reduction using… a gamma squeeze?
Source: Zerohedge